Whenever site owners hear about technical SEO for the first time, it’s normal to feel slightly intimidated.
After all, the word ‘technical’ usually means that something is pretty complicated and requires special knowledge to understand.
The good news?
There are plenty of free technical SEO tools out there that simplify and speed up the process.
These tools will help you perform tasks like identifying and resolving indexing errors, improving page loading speed, and finding broken links.
Regular technical SEO audits are absolutely necessary for maintaining search rankings, so it’s not something you can ignore.
For example, you may have what’s known as an orphan page on your website, which means it has no internal links pointing at it (making it next to impossible for anyone to find). If you never audit your technical SEO, you’ll never catch this error, and the page will remain in obscurity forever.
A solid technical SEO tool will quickly identify things like orphan pages and broken links.
Yet, not every technical SEO tool is worth your time, so how do you know which ones to use?
In this article, we’re going to cover the top 14 technical SEO tools that you need to start using today, so stick around!
Why Do Technical SEO Tools Matter?
Without testing tools, some aspects of technical SEO become impossible.
For instance, how are you supposed to know how fast your pages load without using a tool to check them? It’s not something you can eyeball, as you need specific numbers to know if you’ll pass Google’s Core Web Vitals test or not.
Without using a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to uncover your speed metrics, you’ll just be shooting in the dark.
That’s why technical SEO tools are necessary: they remove all guesses from the equation.
The best tools provide in-depth metrics you can use to refine your strategy without leaving anything to chance. They also provide essential functions like creating XML sitemaps, uncovering duplicate content, and fixing indexing errors.
In short, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from using technical tools, especially since most of them are either free or have free versions.
The Top 14 Technical SEO Tools Available Right Now
Search for ‘technical SEO tools’ on Google, and you’re met with a ton of options:
That’s not to mention all the listicles comparing and contrasting dozens of other technical SEO programs.
Given the sheer variety, it can be confusing for site owners to know which tool will work best for their needs.
Also, some tools require expensive memberships yet only provide basic SEO services you can easily replicate with free tools.
It would be a shame to waste your marketing budget on a paid membership when you could have used a free program, which is why you shouldn’t pick the first tool you come across.
Beyond that, you need to know what you’re going to use each tool for, as their features will vary.
Here are some common technical SEO tasks:
- Conduct SEO audits
- Check your website’s page loading times
- View crucial SEO metrics
- Check how Google views your website content
- Fix broken links
- Find duplicate content
- Create & upload XML sitemaps
- Replace 404 pages with 301 redirects
- Clean up messy Javascript & CSS
- Test schema structured data markup
- Optimize your website for mobile devices
Before you go searching for tools, make a list of the main tasks you want it to knock out. It could be that you want a comprehensive technical SEO audit tool, or you may want to focus on broken links and duplicate content.
Either way, you need to know what you want before you start entering your credit card information.
This is why we put together a list containing the 14 highest quality technical SEO tools. They’ll handle everything from boosting page speed to testing structured data markup and everything in between!
Google Search Console is a go-to tool for everything SEO.
Whether you want to monitor your keyword position rankings, check your backlinks, or uncover indexing errors (plus ways to fix them), GSC is your central hub for monitoring your on-site and off-site optimizations.
GSC is an extremely powerful tool for technical SEO because you get to peek behind the curtain and see how Google’s algorithms view your website.
For example, you’ll get to see which pages on your site Google has in its index via the Index Coverage Report. If a page you want to rank isn’t in Google’s index, it won’t appear in the SERPs (search engine results pages) at all.
The good news is GSC will notify you of any indexing errors.
As you can see, it provides a reason for the indexing error, which also informs you of the fix.
For example, let’s say a page you want to rank shows an ‘excluded by noindex tag’ error like one of the web pages in the picture.
This means the web page has a noindex tag, which is a piece of HTML code that tells Google’s crawlers not to include the page in its index.
Therefore, removing the noindex tag from the HTML is all that’s required to fix the issue.
While this is an easy fix, you would have had no clue why the web page wasn’t getting indexed if it weren’t for GSC!
Other useful GSC features for technical SEO
Besides the Index Coverage Report, you’ll also want to make use of GSC’s other reports for your technical SEO.
These include:
The Page Experience Report
Technical SEO isn’t only about fixing complex technical tweaks that occur behind-the-scenes of your website.
It’s also about ensuring a pleasant user experience for visitors to your site, and that’s where GSC’s Page Experience Report comes in handy.
This report provides insights into your website’s user experience.
Crucial metrics to pay attention to here include your performance on the Core Web Vitals Test (which examines loading speed, stability, and interactivity) and your HTTPS status.
In order for users to have a safe experience on your website, your HTTPS status needs to be ‘good.’
You also get to see the percentage of your web pages that feature a good page experience on both desktop and mobile.
The XML Sitemap Report
It’s an SEO best practice to upload your XML sitemap to GSC. Doing so makes it easier for Google’s bots to crawl your website and make sense of your internal linking structure.
Once you’ve uploaded your sitemap, the XML Sitemap Report provides lots of useful features, including:
- Checking the status of your sitemap, which indicates whether Google has successfully processed your sitemap or if there were any errors.
- You can view in-depth details about your sitemap, including how many URLs were submitted vs. how many were actually indexed.
It’s important to view both the status and details of your sitemap once you submit it to ensure everything is in order.
For instance, you may discover that one of the URLs that you want to rank was submitted but not indexed. In that scenario, you’d need to head over to the Index Coverage Report to see what went wrong.
Once you’ve checked to make sure each page important to your SEO is indexed, you’ll know they’ll have a fighting chance on the SERPs.
Google Analytics 4 is another one of Google’s free tools that’s a must-use for SEOs.
What’s the difference between GA4 and GSC?
Where GSC focuses on search metrics (search traffic, keyword rankings, etc.), GA4 deals with user behavior and engagement metrics.
In other words, Google Search Console is for monitoring search algorithm optimizations, and Google Analytics 4 is for monitoring the behavior of your target audiences.
This means that using GSC and GA4 in tandem will ensure your SEO appeals to both search algorithms and humans, which is what you want.
On the technical SEO side of things, GA4’s reporting capabilities are second to none.
Primarily, GA4 is a useful tool because it gives you a real-time view of what’s happening on your website.
This is huge because most website audit tools report problems after they’ve already occurred. With GA4, you can uncover major issues as soon as they happen.
Key metrics to pay attention to include:
- Bounce rate. This metric lets you know how frequently users click away from your website without venturing further into your content. If a user visits one of your landing pages from the SERPs and doesn’t click on an internal link to another page, it counts as a bounce.
- Dwell time. Equally as important as bounce rates are your dwell times. Bounce rates measure how often users leave without visiting another web page, while dwell times measure how long users stay on one of your web pages. If you discover that users are spending an average of 5 – 10 minutes on a piece of content, it means they’re consuming it all the way through – which is a great sign. Quick dwell times indicate a problem with your content, such as poor loading speed or irrelevant information.
It’s also crucial to pay attention to your organic traffic levels. If you notice a steep dropoff, it’s typically a sign that you have an indexing issue. In that case, you could open GSC to pinpoint and resolve the issue (see how well these two programs work together?).
| Pro tip: High bounce rates don’t always mean there’s a problem with your content. This is because, for a web visit to count as a bounce, a user has to visit one page on your site and then click away. That’s not always a bad thing, especially if the user got what they needed from your content and thus had no need to venture further into your website.
Also, bounce rates don’t consider dwell time, meaning a user could stay on one page for two hours before clicking away, and it would still count as a bounce. This doesn’t mean that bounce rates are a bad metric; it’s just that you should always check your dwell time before jumping to conclusions. |
Next, let’s take a look at our free SEO Audit Tool, which you can use to uncover tons of valuable technical SEO insights.
This tool is not only great for auditing your own website, but also for gauging the strength of your competitors.
To use it, you’ll need to enter your:
- Website URL
- First name
- Email address
Once you’ve entered all the information, hit Run Report to receive a free comprehensive SEO audit.
Here’s what the audit page includes:
- An overall grade for your website’s SEO performance (on a scale from 1 – 100, with 100 being the best)
- Recommendations for keyword usage (such as if a keyword is missing from a title tag)
- An in-depth backlink analysis
- A task list detailing all the fixes necessary to improve your score
Our favorite feature of the tool is definitely the ‘task list’ we provide at the end. Improving your SEO is as simple as checking off each box on the list!
Other features of the report include:
- Checking for canonical tags
- Duplicate H1 tags
- Missing alt text
- Javascript errors
- Schema markup
- HREFLANG attributes
- Whether your meta descriptions are the optimal length (between 70 and 160 characters)
- Making sure your website isn’t using unwanted noindex tags
- Checking for a robots.txt file
- Ensuring your site uses HTTPS & SSL
- Checking for the presence of an XML sitemap
As you can see, the tool notifies you about virtually every technical SEO issue there is, so don’t hesitate to use it.
If you want to enjoy top keyword rankings on Google, you’ll have to pass its Core Web Vitals test.
What’s that?
It’s a test Google runs on every website in its index to measure:
- Page loading speed
- Interactivity
- Visual stability
It’s no secret that lightning-fast internet has spoiled everyone for many years now, and modern internet users are anything but patient regarding loading times.
So, if your web pages are struggling with loading speed, users won’t hang around past a millisecond or two – which will cause your bounce rate to increase and dwell time to go down.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights provides detailed metrics for your loading times, including how fast your website loads on desktops and mobile devices, which is a plus.
There is one important note to make about PageSpeed Insights, though.
It does not use the exact loading speed of your website; it uses approximations instead.
While these approximations are undoubtedly accurate, you should use multiple tools to get a clearer picture of your loading times.
However, a stand-out feature of PageSpeed Insights is its ability to point out and recommend potential solutions for problems with your loading times. There will even be a link under each issue it points out that says, “Should Fix”:
That’s why this tool makes our list.
It’s an excellent way to find & resolve the top errors that are holding your loading times back, which will vastly improve your website’s user experience.
Up until December 2023, Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test was THE tool for testing mobile friendliness on Google.
However, on December 4th, 2023, Google put an end to its Mobile-Friendly Test API.
According to the team at Google, the tool had become antiquated, as there were far better ways of testing mobile friendliness.
One of which is Google Lighthouse, a suite of tools that audit:
- Performance
- Accessibility
- Progressive web apps
- SEO
It’s crucial to note that Lighthouse’s suite includes PageSpeed Insights. While PSI is still a fantastic tool to use on its own, Lighthouse provides a more comprehensive view of your website’s performance, including loading speed and mobile-friendliness.
If you want to use Lighthouse, then you’ll have to download Google Chrome if you don’t have it already.
This is because Lighthouse is a part of Chrome DevTools. In fact, it has its very own panel in DevTools.
Whenever you run a report, you can choose as many (or as few) categories as you want, and you have the option to analyze your performance on both mobile and desktop.
Yes, this tool provides yet another way to test your website’s loading speed and performance.
The catch is GTmetrix has some truly unique features that you won’t find in any other tool. This is because the score blends your raw loading speed with how well your website is optimized for performance.
Therefore, the GTmetrix score is an effective judgment of your loading speed AND user experience.
What’s even cooler is that the tool uses real data from Google Lighthouse and the Core Web Vitals test. This means you’re getting extremely accurate data coming straight from Google.
Here are some other stand-out features of the tool:
- Unique performance metrics: You get to peep crucial metrics like load times, resource usage, visual stability, and more. This comprehensive analysis helps identify and prioritize performance issues that could negatively impact SEO.
- Real-world testing: You can test your website’s speed from different locations and under various device and connection settings. GTmetrix helps ensure the site performs well regardless of location or device.
- Waterfall analysis: This chart is invaluable for diagnosing complex performance issues. That’s because it shows how each resource loads and helps pinpoint specific elements that slow down the page, allowing for targeted optimizations.
As you can see, GTmetrix provides the most in-depth analysis options for loading times, which is why we had to include it on the list.
While Google’s free tools are more than adequate for most simple issues, GTmetrix is the way to go if you’re experiencing complicated loading issues.
The tool doesn’t have a free version, but the starter pricing plan is only $4.25 per month, which is definitely affordable considering the advanced features you gain access to.
Spotty URL structures and duplicate content are two SEO issues that will wreak havoc on your keyword rankings.
Duplicate content occurs whenever you try to rank two identical pages for the same keywords, and it confuses Google’s algorithm. This causes:
- Google to choose one page over the other (which is usually the page you DIDN’T want to rank)
- The algorithm fluctuates between ranking both pages, causing major dips in traffic
URL structure refers to how you format your URLs, such as www.yourwebsite.com/blog.
If your URLs are too complex and don’t follow a logical structure, search engine crawlers will have a difficult time discovering relevant pages on your website to index.
What do these two issues have in common?
They’re both next-to-impossible to spot without the aid of a website crawler, and Screaming Frog is the industry leader.
Screaming Frog will help you quickly identify the following technical issues on your website:
- Images that are too large (which can affect loading speed)
- Errors in your URLs
- Canonical tag issues (i.e., more than one canon tag)
- Missing meta descriptions & meta keywords
- Missing page titles
- Response code errors
- Pagination issues
- Uncovering international SEO issues
These issues can potentially tank your SEO profile, so it’s worth crawling your website regularly.
You can also use Screaming Frog to pinpoint inconsistencies in your URL structure.
Your URLs need to follow a rigid structure to make it easier for Google’s bots to crawl your site, and Screaming Frog is an excellent tool for spotting any errors.
Rich results are a goldmine for SEO, so you should definitely target them with your content.
What are rich results?
We could go on a convoluted explanation of what they are, but a visual example will work best:
This ‘snippet’ that appears at the top of the search results (in what’s called position zero) is an example of a rich result.
Coincidentally, the rich result is also describing rich results, which include:
- Carousels (most common for e-commerce products)
- Images
- Knowledge bars
- Featured snippets (which is what the image above is)
Rich results are powerful for SEO because you appear above the organic search results and paid ads. According to research, featured snippets and other results snag 35.1% of the total click share whenever they appear.
Achieving position zero for a keyword means you’ll automatically beat out all your organic competitors since you’ll reign above the #1 result.
But how do you know if your content will trigger rich results?
That’s where Google’s Rich Results Testing Tool enters the picture.
It will let you know whether your web pages are set up to trigger rich results. In particular, the tool checks to see if your structured data (also called schema markup) is considered valid according to Google’s guidelines.
Structured data is simply a standardized format for providing information about the content on your page. Accepted structured data formats include JSON-LD, RDFa, and Microdata.
What’s truly handy is that the tool highlights any errors it finds and provides suggestions for improvement. That’ll save you the time and hassle of trying to figure out why your content isn’t triggering featured snippets or knowledge bars.
Not only that, but you can preview how your rich results may appear in Google Search. This is extremely helpful for seeing how your content gets displayed to users, which is great for uncovering any potential issues.
For instance, you may discover that Google isn’t displaying a featured snippet correctly, such as failing to include the right quote.
It’s far better to uncover and resolve any issues during the preview phase instead of having to deal with them after they’ve gone live.
Once your structured data is confirmed valid and you’re happy with the preview, you can submit your page to Google for indexing. As soon as that’s done, your content should start displaying rich results, which is great news for your organic traffic numbers (hint: they’ll go up).
As stated previously, duplicate content presents real problems for search rankings, and it’s not something you want to deal with on a regular basis.
This is why Siteliner comes in handy.
While not quite a website crawler like Screaming Frog, it provides a similar service by identifying duplicate content and broken links.
If you want to quickly discover if you have duplicate content, enter your URL into Siteliner and hit Go.
It will crawl up to 250 pages at once and then notify you of any duplicate content it finds.
Why use this tool instead of Screaming Frog?
You can use either, but we like to use Siteliner for its pure speed.
While it doesn’t have as many features as Screaming Frog, it excels at what it does provide. Finding duplicate content is extremely fast and easy with Siteliner, so it’s a good first stop if you suspect you have duplicate pages causing issues.
Siteline is particularly valuable for E-commerce site owners since duplicate content runs amok in that industry.
Why is that?
It’s because E-commerce sites often have multiple identical pages for different versions of the same product, such as different colors for a hat.
The blue hat page is virtually identical to the red hat page, and they’re both trying to rank for the same keywords. Strategic use of canonical tags is the solution to this issue, but Siteliner is a great way to find out if you have an issue to begin with.
Other useful features
Besides uncovering duplicate content, Siteliner has other useful features for technical SEO.
These include:
- Uncovering broken links
- Finding skipped pages
- Related domains
- Running site reports
- Downloading XML sitemaps
The Broken Links tab will help you uncover any broken links on your website at the click of a button. You’ll get to see a complete breakdown of all the broken links on your site, as well as page summaries for each (where the broken links are highlighted).
Once you uncover them, you can fix them by either adding a new hyperlink or using a 301 redirect.
You can also use Siteliner to double-check your loading times & page sizes.
Siteliner will display your average page speed and average page size compared to other websites – which is a great way to see how you stack up with the competition.
SSL certificates are a must for any website in today’s age, especially if you want to rank on Google.
Google announced HTTPS as an official ranking factor way back in August of 2014, which means your site needs an SSL certificate.
| What is an SSL certificate? Put simply, an SSL certificate is a digital certificate that enables an encrypted connection to your website, meaning it scrambles important user information like credit card numbers. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer, and it’s a bit outdated. Modern SSL certificates actually use a revamped version of SSL that’s called TLS (Transport Layer Security), but everyone still refers to them as ‘SSL’ certificates. |
Secure browsing is especially important for websites with E-commerce features since nobody wants to enter their payment information on a site that isn’t encrypted.
As we’ve detailed in a blog post from the past, it’s quite easy to get an SSL certificate for free.
If you aren’t sure if one of your online properties has an SSL certificate, you can use our free SSL certificate checker tool.
All you have to do is enter your URL and hit Run Certificate Check.
Here’s what happens when we run our site through the tool:
As you can see, we have an extremely up-to-**** SSL certificate on our site. The tool also lets us know that future Chrome updates will consider SSL certificates issued before June 1st, 2016, as obsolete.
This means you should definitely use this tool to check your certificates to make sure they’re all up to ****!
Next up is the Web Developer toolbar extension that’s available for Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Opera.
What is it?
It’s a free browser extension that equips web developers and SEO professionals with powerful tools for analyzing and manipulating web pages.
With it, you can quickly inspect page elements that matter for your technical SEO, including:
- HTML analysis: The toolbar lets you inspect and analyze the HTML structure of any webpage. This matters for SEO because your HTML structure plays a big role in how search engine crawlers perceive your content. If anything is off, such as the inclusion of a noindex tag, it can cause certain web pages to disappear from the search rankings. Having a tool that lets you view your HTML to check for errors is incredibly useful, and it’s free to boot.
- Meta information: Metadata is crucial for SEO, as your meta tags need to contain important keywords. Whenever a search engine bot crawls your website, your metadata is the very first thing it will see, so your target keywords better be in there. With the Web Developer toolbar, you can check your metadata to ensure it’s properly optimized for search engines.
You can also disable the CSS and JavaScript using the Web Developer toolbar, which is useful for revealing how search engines view the page.
With CSS and JavaScript turned off, you can quickly uncover content rendering and accessibility issues, such as missing image alt tags.
Speaking of image alt tags, you can analyze every image on your website with the toolbar. You’ll be able to see the alt attributes for your images, which are extremely important to include.
Why is that?
It’s because alt text is how search engines (and users with disabilities) make sense of the images you include. Crawler bots don’t have computer vision, so they won’t be able to see any of your images. Alt text is a short line of text describing what an image shows, and it’s an SEO best practice to include target keywords in alt tags (so that crawler bots see them).
The toolbar also lets you view and edit image dimensions, which is another factor that can affect performance and SEO. For example, if your image’s dimensions are off, they may not display properly on mobile devices.
Lastly, the Web Developer toolbar is excellent for examining your backlinks and internal links. The ‘view link details’ feature lets you take a look at all the links on a page, including internal and external links.
This is useful because:
- It helps you identify broken links
- You can check the follow/nofollow tags for your backlinks
A follow tag is a line of HTML code that tells Google to count a backlink towards your SEO. Conversely, a nofollow tag tells Google to ignore a backlink (although it will still have some impact on your rankings, just not as much as a follow link).
For the backlinks you want to impact your rankings the most, ensure they all contain follow tags, as long as they don’t violate Google’s guidelines.
In particular, Google requires all press backlinks to contain nofollow tags, so your press releases CANNOT contain follow tags – so bear that in mind when using the toolbar.
The W3C Validator is a free online tool that acts as a quality control check for your website’s code.
It ensures your site follows the official “rulebook” set by the W3C, the organization responsible for web standards.
That may seem technical, but adhering to these standards has clear benefits for both your users and your search engine rankings.
Here’s how it works.
Think of the Validator as a spell checker for code. You simply enter your website’s address, and it scans the underlying HTML, CSS, and other elements.
If it finds anything that doesn’t follow the rules, it flags it as an error or warning. As a bonus, the tool also provides helpful tips on how to fix any issues it finds.
While the W3C Validator won’t magically boost your site to #1 on Google – clean, valid code contributes to a better overall SEO strategy through the following ways:
- Easier crawling: Search engines like Google can navigate your site more smoothly when the code is nice and tidy. This helps Google’s crawler bots understand your content and index your pages properly.
- Happy users: Valid code often means a website that works flawlessly across different browsers and devices. A good user experience keeps people on your site longer, which signals to search engines that your content is valuable.
- Accessibility: Following web standards often improves accessibility for people with disabilities. Inclusive websites tend to rank better as they cater to a wider audience.
- Technical SEO fixes: The Validator can catch technical SEO issues like broken links or incorrect header tags.
MozBar is a free browser extension for Google Chrome that yields real-time SEO insights while you’re browsing the web or analyzing the SERPs (search engine results pages).
Moz is the brand behind the Domain Authority score, and the company’s data is extremely reliable.
The primary benefit of MozBar is the ability to get instant SEO metrics and insights without having to leave your web browser.
Whenever you’re on a web page, click on the MozBar to uncover its:
- Domain Authority (DA) score
- Page authority (PA) score
- Total number of backlinks
- Keywords used on the page
- Details about a web page’s title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, and other key on-page SEO elements
Let’s say you’re browsing the web when you come across a site in your niche that’s doing better than you are on the SERPs.
That’s when you open up MozBar to check out the web page’s backlinks. When doing so, you uncover a few websites in your industry that accept guest posts (that you didn’t know about before).
Voila, you just used MozBar to inform your SEO strategy.
That’s one simple example of MozBar’s power, and the fact that it’s free means installing it is a no-brainer.
Google is constantly updating and tweaking its search algorithms, even outside of its officially announced ‘core’ updates.
In fact, Google’s algorithms are updated literally thousands of times per year.
That’s a lot of opportunities for things to go wrong with your SEO, especially if an algorithm change caused a manual action against one of your web pages.
Barracuda’s Panguin tool is a quick, easy, and free way to find out if your website (or a site you’re investigating) has been impacted by Google’s algorithm updates. In particular, it’s useful for determining whether a site has had its rankings impacted by an algorithm change or not.
To use the tool, sign in using your Google account. From there, Penguin will access your website’s GA4 data and provide a visual overview of your organic traffic.
At the bottom of the page, you’ll see a group of icons representing various Google algorithm changes:
You also have the option to toggle certain changes on and off to hone in on particular types.
Wrapping Up: The 14 Best Technical SEO Tools
The tools on this list will make performing an in-depth technical SEO audit on your website a heck of a lot easier.
From identifying duplicate content to fixing indexing errors, these tools will ensure all the technical aspects of your SEO strategy work flawlessly – making it effortless for web bots to crawl your website.
Do you need help with the technical SEO at your company?
Then don’t wait to check out our extensive Technical SEO Service. Our digital marketing gurus know everything there is to know about technical SEO, and our audits leave no stone unturned. Go with your gut and book a call today!
